One of my historical heroines! She'd caught smallpox herself when she was in her 20s, and was badly scarred, and her brother died of it, but she was splendidly spirited woman. Her husband (she'd eloped to marry him) was made Ambassador to Constantinople, she insisted on accompanying him, with their young son, (which was pretty well unheard of) While she was there, she saw something very interesting, as she wrote in a letter to a friend in 1717:
I am going to tell you a thing, that will make you wish yourself here. The small-pox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless. . . . There is a set of old women, who make it their business to perform the operation, every autumn, in the month of September, when the great heat is abated. People send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the small-pox; they make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together) the old woman comes with a nut-shell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what vein you please to have opened. She immediately rips open that you offer her, with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch) and puts into the vein as much matter as can lie upon the head of her needle, and after that, binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell . . .